Wrong Turns, Right Destination
None of us planned the path that led us into foster care, adoption, or a blended family. Many people call it a wrong turn. I call it Plan B parenting.
There is an old aviation nickname that captures this better than any parenting book I have read: Wrong Way Corrigan. I always enjoy comparing what he claims happened with my foster parenting journey.
Nobody Plans a Plan B Family
Nobody grows up planning to be a foster parent. Nobody drafts a list of childhood goals that includes “marry someone with three kids from a previous marriage” or “get a call from a caseworker on a Tuesday night.” The paths that lead to Plan B families usually start somewhere else. A couple plans for biological children and gets years of infertility instead. A single adult plans a quiet life and gets a call about a niece who needs a bed for the night. A parent plans a lifelong marriage and ends up with a divorce, a second marriage, and stepchildren who did not ask for any of this.
Divorce that reroutes a family is more than a smaller version of a child’s removal from a dangerous home. Both experiences carry real grief, real loyalty conflicts, and real disruption to the life a child expected to have. Stepfamilies did not stumble into an easier version of Plan B parenting. They stumbled into their own version of it.
None of us planned to be here. That is not a flaw in the story. It might be the whole point, and it is why I call it Plan B instead of an accident.
The Flight That Earned Him a Nickname
Douglas Corrigan filed a flight plan from New York to California on July 17, 1938. Aviation authorities denied him permission and told him to return home to the West Coast. He agreed, took off, flew into a cloud bank, and did not land again for twenty-eight hours. When he came down, he was in Dublin, Ireland, not California. He told reporters that fog and a bad compass reading sent him east instead of west.
Almost nobody believed him. He had asked officials for a transatlantic permit every year since 1935, and they refused him every time. He knew his airplane down to the last bolt. Nobody who knew him thought the compass story was true, and he never broke character to admit otherwise. But “wrong way” was the story he told for the rest of his life, and the country gave him a ticker-tape parade for it.
What the Compass Really Showed
Whether Corrigan actually got lost matters less than what he did afterward. He did not spend the rest of his life apologizing for landing in Dublin. He wrote a book about it, starred in a movie about it, and flew his airplane in parades until he was in his eighties.
He also never tried to live down the nickname. “Wrong Way” became the name people knew him by, not something he hid from. That is close to what I mean by Plan B parenting. It is not a lesser plan I settled for. It is the name I gave the plan I actually got, and I built something real out of it.
The part of the story that applies to Plan B families is this: however we got here, we get to decide what the arrival means.
What the Research Says About Turning a Wrong Turn into a Right One
Researchers have actually studied this. They call it redemptive narration: a story that starts bad and ends good. That is the same shift Plan B parenting asks for, from an accident we endured to a plan we made our own.
A 2025 study asked young adults in the United States and the United Kingdom to describe a turning point in their lives, then measured their well-being right after they told it. The people who told a redemptive version, meaning something hard that led somewhere better, reported real gains in well-being and positive emotion. That held in both countries.
The same study found something worth flagging. Some participants told an unresolved version of their turning point, where the hardship never resolved and the ending stayed hard. That version showed up often enough in both countries that the researchers took it seriously. Redemption is not automatic. Nobody owes anybody a redemption story just because they went through something hard.
A 2023 paper on post-traumatic growth found something similar. Researchers there identified five ways people report positive change after a major disruption. One of the five is new possibilities for the life path. Some people do not just recover from a bad turn. They find a route they would not have found otherwise. This is one finding inside a larger framework, not a study about parents specifically, so I would not lean on it alone. It does line up with the 2025 study, and that convergence counts for something.
When It Still Feels Like the Wrong Turn
Some of you are not ready to call your unplanned path a redemption story yet. Maybe you are three months into a placement that looks nothing like a ticker-tape parade. Maybe your stepfamily is still working out who sits where at Thanksgiving. Maybe the wrong turn still just feels wrong.
You do not have to force it into a redemption story yet. The research on unresolved narratives does not describe a character flaw. It describes where you are right now, not where you will stay. Corrigan collected rejection after rejection for three years before he ever got off the ground. The parade came later, and it came a long time later.
Nobody has to finish the story by a deadline. Calling it Plan B parenting does not require you to feel triumphant about how you got here.
Corrigan never admitted that he meant to fly to Ireland. He did not need to. The compass story was never the point. What he built out of that landing was the point.
Most of us in Plan B families did not choose our flight path either. We filed for somewhere else and ended up here. That does not make the destination wrong. It makes it Plan B, and Plan B is still a plan.
Want to go deeper? My book, Raising Other People’s Children covers what it actually looks like to build a family through foster care, adoption, or a blended family, day to day.
